Mars’ Snickers More Nuts

22Jan

Day two of Snickers Week brings us a super duper, highly thoughtful and borderline revolutionary new Snickers bar from Mars UK. Ok, I might have gone a little over the top. Or a LOT over the top. Because the Snickers More Nuts is a regular Snickers bar…with a few more nuts. Awe-inspiringly original stuff from Mars’ product development department, but something I was interested in trying none the less as a limited edition product.

As you can see from the second photograph, the tagline here goes beyond Snickers’ “Get Some Nuts”. This More Nuts bar has an extra 10% jammed into the long and thin rectangular bar shape. That’s literally the only difference between this and the Snickers bar I reviewed yesterday. Who said limited edition products weren’t exciting eh…

It actually took me a couple of days to find the More Nuts bar, a search not helped by our now irritatingly long snow season here in England. If you’re reading this snow- go away, you’ve become very tiresome! Anyway, a helpful tweet from Katherine at Grocery Gems food blog (a blog dedicated solely to new and limited edition bars…so this was right up her street too) directed me to a Co-op supermarket and all was well with the world.

You can see from the cross-sectioning of the bar that, to the naked eye, this is just about identical to the regular Snickers bar. If you buy the More Nuts and expect it to start exploding with peanuts, you’ll be very disappointed.

In fact it isn’t just the inner contents which look the same- the whole More Nuts bar is remarkably similar to the plain old Snickers. The wrapper is the same dull brown colour; the style and design is very similar too. Obviously in place of ‘SNICKERS’ on the bar’s packaging you’ll see ‘More Nuts’ but given that the ‘More Nuts’ name is presented in exactly the same fashion (i.e. an identical font, colour and size) I’d hazard a guess that many consumers might pick this up by accident and not even notice that it isn’t a regulation Snickers. There is a very small ‘limited edition’ tag in yellow towards the end of the More Nuts but that is the biggest visual difference.

The More Nuts actually weighs the same (58g) as a normal Snickers too so the value for money aspect doesn’t change with this limited edition version. This is going to cost you about 60p, meaning that you’re paying roughly a penny per gram… about average for mass-produced chocolate.

How does the More Nuts smell? Well, it was just about a replica of yesterday’s Snickers. A nice sweet milk chocolate with some intense nuttiness. Nothing new and the nut element wasn’t anymore ‘in your face’ than normal despite the extra 10% peanut content here. I would say whether it was more/less appealing than a Snickers, but in reality it was exactly the same. I couldn’t notice any difference in smell.

So Mars’ selling point here is that the More Nuts has 10% more peanuts. And that is exactly what it tastes like. There is a very slight shift in flavour between this limited edition bar and the standard alternative, with more emphasis on the roasted salty peanuts and their crispy texture. It isn’t a drastic reimagining of the bar, but a delicate twist.

The pleasantly creamy and thick chocolate coating has the same level of creaminess (well it would do- it’s exactly the same chocolate Mars are using!) whilst the nougat is also identical in taste and texture to the ordinary Snickers. There is a marginal reduction in the caramel layer I think, which doesn’t strongly alter the overall taste as you still get its chewiness and stringiness as you bite into the bar.

How would I summarise the taste? It is what you’d expect when you read the ‘10% more nuts’ tagline. There is a tiny tweak and if you REALLY concentrate you’ll probably notice a few more peanuts. But essentially it’s the same, decent tasting bar of chocolate from Mars.

My overall feeling towards the Snickers More Nuts bar is one of disappointment. In my view, if you’re going to release a limited edition product, it should be a radically different and exciting alternative to that which is already available. This is lacklustre though- it shows very little creativity or imagination and I don’t really know what Mars’ thinking is with it- do they expect a bar which is practically identical to the Snickers bar to product a sudden uplift in sales? If so, I suspect they’ll be disappointed.

I don’t want my criticism of the concept to be understood as a criticism of the taste itself. You see, this is a nice tasting bar of chocolate. But the problem is, if it had come out of an ordinary Snickers wrapper, I wouldn’t have thought “oooh, this tastes different, must be a limited edition bar”. I would have assumed that it was the same bar which had just had an extra couple of peanuts accidentally knocked into it by one of Mars’ machines.

The More Nuts just isn’t adventurous enough. It actually tastes just as good as the Snickers I reviewed yesterday, but I’m knocking a little from the rating on principle- thou shalt not release boring and unoriginal bars and expect them to be successful Mars.

4 responses to “Mars’ Snickers More Nuts”

Thanks for the mention Dave! Glad I could be of help with finding the More Nuts. I’m not sure if it was worth a walk in the snow – it’s just too similar to a Snickers isn’t it? I wish they had thrown some new flavour in there as well as the 10% extra nuts.